Miesville, MN: Small Town Baseball At its Best

This summer, I fulfilled a years-long dream of riding my bicycle to a Miesville Mudhens game.

For those not keeping up on Minnesota’s “town league” baseball tradition, the Mudhens are one of the many small town ball teams that play for a few months in the summertime. What separates Miesville from the rest of the pack — Savage, Red Wing, Rochester, Austin, etc. — is that the town is very small (population 125), and the ballfield is particularly bucolic.

Miesville is basically a crossroads a few miles north of the Cannon River, pretty near Welch. Miesville can boast of a few houses (including a brand new cul-de-sac), a supper club, a burger bar, a park, and a church or two. But the main feature of Miesville, the one you can see from a mile away, is the ballfield. The lights rise up out of the corn, there’s a lovely sheltered wooden grandstand behind home plate, and a few sets of bleachers extend up along each baseline. The outfield fence almost literally sits in corn-rows, and the whole thing has the feel of the field from Field of Dreams (only its a lot closer).

I got a few friends together and we rode our bicycles down to Miesville. The good citizens of the city allowed us to camp in the city park, so we enjoyed ourselves at the game (an extra-innings close match between the Mudhens and the visiting team from Savage) before having burgers and beer at Kings, and riding back the next morning.